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“The only way to avoid these food crises is to build small farmers’ resilience to climate change by investing in climate-smart agriculture”

One of the areas most affected by extreme hazards, in particular natural hazards, is the Dry Corridor of Central America, with recurrent droughts, excessive rains and severe flooding affecting agricultural production. Photo: FAO

About 30,000 families in 58 municipalities in Nicaragua’s ‘Dry Corridor,’ the area of the country most affected by droughts and climate change, are expected to benefit from a financial agreement between the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Nicaragua to boost sustainable agricultural production.

“In recent months, we have seen how bad things can be, not only for small farmers, but for the entire population living in the area,” said Ladislao Rubio, IFAD’s Country Programme Manager for Nicaragua, noting that the rise in temperatures caused by the El Niño phenomenon made agriculture almost impossible, leaving more than 3.5 million people in Central America dependent on food aid to survive.

“The only way to avoid these food crises is to build small farmers’ resilience to climate change by investing in climate-smart agriculture,” he added.

Regional falling agriculture production has led to food insecurity and particularly a decline in household incomes and has stretched rural families and indigenous people’s resilience.

With the investment, the UN agency, through the Dry Corridor Rural Family Sustainable Development Project (NICAVIDA) project, addresses the situation of Nicaraguan smallholders living in the Dry Corridor, a strip of land in which with 52 per cent of soils are overused and 40 per cent is strongly or severely eroded.